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Thursday, June 12, 2014

treasure

The kids and I keep finding little chips of pottery -- at the river, mixed into the concrete on the way to the park, under the trees at Gosho. Treasures! the kids call out. I fancy that they're talismans of a sort.

Yesterday we found a handful at the river, winking up from among the stones; today, several in the park. Walking further, I found even more, and it became too much for a poetic interpretaion. This is just broken pottery that gets mixed in with the gravel, wherever it is spread.

Can it be both? Quotidien and meaningful? Divine interjection with a human explanation?

Either way, I had the idea to paint them, to treat each chip as its own complete composition and see how they turn out. It seems fitting. I'm always drawn to that shade of indigo, how completely it is complimented by the creamy white. I'm just going to take that at face value and not read anything into it.

Meanwhile: this piece is giving me fits.

The upper left corner in particular is being stubborn. Everything I've tried there looks silly.

I know I'm in a bind when I've divided the piece into quadrants like that, because then inevitably I start protecting the things I do like, when really the solution to that corner probably lies in changing something fundamental about the whole thing.

It's getting hard to charge ahead, now that it's almost time to pack things up and head Stateside for the summer. Maybe by the time I unpack this one in the fall, I'll have found the missing piece and will know exactly what to do.